Electric down nearly 70%

Just like last month, we opened our electric bill with excitement today.  Our bill for September was $57.25 and our usage was down nearly 70% compared to September of 2004.  But it gets better:  our electric company Southern California Edison offered a rebate program if you decreased your summer usage by 20%.  Our usage decreased 48% compared to last summer and so we easily qualified.  The rebate was a 20% credit on our summer bill, almost $77 applied to our September bill.  So actually we have a credit of about $20 with SCE right now.

I summarized all of the changes we made in this post.  We don't have any more changes we are making soon, so I expect we'll be holding ground for a while.  We do hope to have the money this winter to put in a new pump for our well with a holding tank system, rather than a pump-on-demand system, but it's anybody's guess as to whether this will make the top of the funded list.

The other interesting tidbit from our electric bill is that they provided data on the energy sources used to generate the electricity in 2004 and a projection for 2005.  If the projection is correct, renewable energy will make up a bigger percentage in 2005 -- 19% compared to 4%.  Coal generation is down to 13% from 29% but nuclear sources are up from 2% to 20%.  Natural gas is used to generate about 45% of our electricity (same in 2004), so the cost to generate this electricity is obviously up this year.